General comments
If you have general comments about the contents of ‘Low Carbon Industrial Strategy: A Vision’ please add them to this page.
You can download the document by clicking on the cover image.
Supporting material is also available on the BIS website.
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[...] http://interactive.berr.gov.uk/lowcarbon/general-comments/ [...]
This is not a solution to climate change or energy security and should not be showcased here.
The plants being proposed by Blue NG will burn 20,000 tonnes of raw (NOT waste) vegetable oil per year. Production of this volume of oil will displace food crops, ether here or more likely in foreign countries, where land and labour are cheaper.
The company proposes to build around 40 of these plants across the UK. The total oil requirement for these would be 800,000 tonnes per year - equivalent to 80% of the veg oil currently going into transport biodiesel, and requiring over 4 times the total setaside land in England if produced using rapeseed.
There are far more sensible ways to create green electricity than using prime farmland in this country to grow energy crops or worse, causing peatland or forest to be converted in countries like Indonesia or Malaysia. The large scale use of energy crops to make bioliquids is not carbon neutral - many scientists believe it is in fact carbon positive if all the impacts of crop growing and subsequent processing are taken into account.
The Blue NG plants have not got accreditation for renewable obligations certificates, nor have they got a permit from the Environment Agency.
Case studies - blue-NG. There is obligation or legal requirement for Blue-NG to sustainably source their biofuels. They are going to give the local authority a copy of their procurement policy which the local authority will simply file under ‘no interest’.
I would like to encourage reflection on the long-term implications and credibility of this vision. I can’t help wondering what it means to try to direct something with a 40-year time horizon. What did we start 40 years ago that has now come to fruition and what did it take to make that happen? Have we ever achieved the four-fold change, equivalent to that implied by the target of an 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions, in a fundamentally important industrial parameter? What examples of whole societies do we have today that have carbon intensities only 20% of ours?
As we look around at what we do today should we be starting to earmark the ‘dinosaur’ activities that are routine now but must become the exception by 2050? Dragging a tonne and half of ironmongery around with each of wherever we go seems a crazy waste of energy and yet driving a car is just that. The blast of hot air as we enter a shop from a cold street is welcome but is it an extravagance that will seem ridiculous in 40 years time? If we are still driving those cars and feeling those blasts in ten years time will we be seen as criminally negligent by the next generation left to make even more urgent cuts in their quality of life?
Does the Government’s vision based on industrial and technological development really have a prospect of getting us there? If it does not, or even if it does and the rest of the world don’t make it with us what kind of social order will we have in the world? Is the real choice that we face one between committing to give up the ‘business as usual’ now (because the dinosaurs will never make themselves extinct) or accepting the conflict that starker choices will provoke in decades to come? How many of your friends could be persuaded that they should give up something now against a distant and uncertain prospect of a more severe restriction later or a worsening of world tensions?
Any answers? Any more questions?
Act now. Carbon capture technology requires proper economic analysis by reference to the costs involved.
Renewable energy generation is a more credible alternative, with less long term waste than nuclear power.
I liked the BERR report on EVs/PHEVs published last Nov. It made some good points. However, the point on EVs being stores of grid power that could be sold (the report noted that current battery prices preclude this) misses the point a bit since it gives no consideration to dynamic demand management and the role which EVs/PHEVs could play. This is a pity given that HMG is already talking to companies in this area (e.g. RLTec).
The vision and the reality the current situation world wide is that there are large opportunities for new technologies being driven not only by climate change but economics as well. Also old technologies are becoming exhausted.
This environment is inherently unstable giving opportunities to both waste effort but on the other side for radical new ideas to take hold. Any idea of controlling this is probably idealistic.Large establishe organisations usually have resources to undertake extensive research projects but whether they have the corporate freedom to allow the radical break through is questionable. These often come from someone who challenges the “it can’t be done” attitude.
Creating a government strategy is no straight forward when dealing with such a situation. An infrastructure needs to be in place regionally and nationaly that is viewed with trust by indivuals, organisations and funders and listens with the intention of acting on advice of front line activity. Western governments are often not good at this seeing political points as being more important.
Developing countries, not by design, are often better and they are searching for ways to become developed. The current technology change cusp is an ideal opportunity.
The one other aspect I would add is that encouraging post grad university research may be a way of capturing progrees in the UK
SKILLS
DIUS has responded constructively, if more slowly that the TUC would like, to the Defra report on Skills for a Low carbon, Resource-efficient Economy. The TUC was involved in the steering group that produced this study, and supports its critique of the demand-led model of skills provision.
Government is currently focussing on the advice of leading-edge employers (Toyota, Arriva, Babcock’s) are doing to develop green skills. This includes specific green skills – carbon measurement and accounting; understanding and applying low carbon technology; robotting machinery. But, for the TUC, there is also a need for influencing and persuasion skills (as with the role currently being played by the TUC’s environmental workplace reps). So both technical green skills, and behaviour/cultural change skills are needed.
This is what Stern Review said: “The removal of barriers to behavioural change is the third essential element, one that is particularly important in encouraging the take-up of opportunities for energy efficiency” (Stern Review, page xx). Stern’s two other key policies: carbon pricing and R&D investment.
Key issues: Government has to take a lead to make the skills system work better. All SSCs should do more to drive green skills and green behaviours in their sectors - both green technical skills but also influencing, awareness raising skills, rolling out change at work. The Government should also assess and take account of the role of union involvement at work to help accelerate behavioural change.
CCS clusters
Alongside Budget 2009, the SoS announced support for clusters of CCS infrastructure and expertise, focusing on key regions such as Yorkshire and the Humber, the Thames Estuary, the Firth of Forth and Tyne/Tees, bringing major employment and regeneration benefits.
The National Grid has recently stepped up its support for CCS network, bringing its expertise and capacity to bear on developing CCS deployment at scale. Its preliminary assessment of Miliband’s four CCS clusters suggests they could capture 127 million tonnes of CO2 annually (15% of UK emissions). How soon depends heavily on the scale of Government ambition.
But CCS policy currently leads to the encouragement of point-to- point connections (from single power station to CCS store), as with the “up to four” CCS demonstration plants for clean coal. A key concern, therefore, is the development of a strategy that will enhance policy to deliver the current CCS vision policy supporting clusters?
I welcome the aims and objectives of this strategy, but there is an important element which is missing, which greatly increases the urgency of making the change the strategy describes - Peak Oil. ‘Peak Oil’ is the name for the simple physical fact that oil (and gas) production cannot be maintained at full-tilt to the last drop: reducing pressure as fields are drained and the fact that the largest oil finds have happened long ago means that production follows a bell curve. 60 oil producing countries including the UK are already past the ‘peak’ of the bell curve and are sliding down the other side, and when it happens to aggregate global oil production, probably within the next 10 years, the damage wrought on our economy, which relies total on cheap oil to operate, will be far more profound than the ‘credit crunch’. Don’t just take my word for it - the Peak Oil Task Force, made up of many UK business leaders, supports action on Peak Oil. See: http://peakoiltaskforce.net/
Recourse to ‘unconventional sources’ like the Alberta Tar sands won’t help because a) there’s not enough of them and they can’t be produced fast enough and b) they’re not cheap, and the economy is based on cheap oil.
What does this mean for the low carbon industrial strategy? Well we need the changes it describes and we need them ASAP. But beyond that, Peak Oil means that we must stop wasting our resources on infrastructure that has no future. Motorways, runways and car-dependent suburbs spring to mind – in a post peak world, the idea we will be driving and flying as much is preposterous. With the best will in the world we are not going to be able to substitute fossil fuels for renewable energy fast enough for present levels of personal mobility to be maintained. Strategic decisions need to divert resources from being wasted on ‘white elephants’ and put towards assets that will serve us well both in the short term and into the foreseeable future – namely public transport systems and sustainable food production. We should be investing in bio-gas from waste to keep our buses and farm machinery going, and electrifying the rail network as fast as we are able. Also pursuing high speed rail at the expense of improving local rail networks may prove to be unwise – spending billions on getting from London to Manchester 20 minutes faster just to compete with air travel is only sensible if air travel is any competition at all – post Peak it won’t be. (Re)connecting car-dependent communities to the rail network has to be the higher priority.
Business can be stunningly innovative given the right motivation and frame work – the government is right to call time on high carbon economy, but it must move decisively now after its years of inexcusable complacency and give business the it needs impetus to meet this challenge.
Is this not all, and i will steal one of your Ministers phrases, Window Dressing???
Why does the Government go on about “low carbon industrial strategy” when it is letting the only large scale wind turbine factory in britain disappear without a fight.
600 skilled workers in a product that is meant to be in demand ( and is worldwide) what kind of strategy is this??
Carbon Capture and Storage is far from being “Best Available Technology” yet policymakers around the world appear to have awarded it such status without waiting for even one full-scale, full-system demonstration plant to prove itself.
As a concept, CCS is certainly not snake-oil, but it is being marketed and promoted far beyond its weight, to the extent where it may build unstoppable policy momentum without further question of whether it is a sound environmental solution for our low carbon future.
Let’s not get carried away by hype or the promise of riches for the first nations to win the race. Overenthusiasm for CCS could divert money and policy time from more established (yet still immature) low carbon technologies, such as existing small-scale pebble-bed nuclear for example, or more mature renewable technologies.
I would urge ministers to take a step back, particularly ahead of Copenhagen, and ensure CCS is prioritized as a last resort.
In terms of Britain’s competitiveness and leadership, we don’t necessarily need to build CCS into our own low carbon future to become a world leader in the science, technology and engineering behind it. CO2 is not an evil poison, it is a useful industrial gas. By focusing on industrial CO2 capture, transportation, trade and handling, we could develop advanced competitive innovation and skills to allow us to revitalise our coal industry, mitigate our own contributions to global warming, and export our technologies and skills to those nations who choose to pump the gas underground as waste.
Question for James Ockenden:
I agree that CCS is not yet “BAT”, and I like your idea that we could put sequestered CO2 to some use rather than storing it underground. But how could we safely consume the volumes emitted - millions of tonnes in the UK and billions of tonnes globally?